I Don't Feel
by misterreese
Summary: A narrative from Nathan's perspective about not being able to feel and how it affects his daily routine and life style.


AN: This is my first Haven story. It just a narrative from Nathan's perspective about his daily routine and life, dealing with his lack of feeling. Enjoy.

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My days always start the same; my alarm clock rings me awake at five am every morning. Instinctively I reach out in my grogginess of sleep to silence the morning mosquito. I can't actually feel the button that I'm pushing, but I know I disabled it because the blaring has ceased. Moments later my eyes open and I blink away the sleep that taunts me to return. Slowly I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed. There are a few things I always have to do before I start my morning preparation.

I have to check what the weather is going to be like. I know what season it, but I have to know if it is going to snow, rain or be sunny. The days that there is rain in the forecast I have to make sure to bring a jacket with me and wear the right pair of boots and if it going to be extra sunny out I have to make sure I put on some sunscreen on. A few months ago the weatherman was wrong about what the weather was going to be like for two weeks. He said that it was going to be bleak and rainy but it turned out to be partly cloudy, so I stopped taking my rain jacket with me to work. However, one day it did rain, it poured. It rained more in that day than it did the entire month. I got caught in that storm with no jacket or boots, I subsequently developed a case of hypothermia (despite the fact that it was still sixty degrees while raining) and had to spend the night in the hospital.

After I know the weather report I lay out the appropriate clothes and head to shower. Now, showers are a peculiar thing. From the few decades that I've been around, I've gathered that a majority of people enjoy taking showers. I however, am not a majority of people and I do not enjoy taking showers. It is a strange fifteen minutes when you are just standing naked in a confined space. I can watch the water run down my chest, I can see myself washing my hair but I don't get the relaxation from the hot water. Not that I use hot water, I use cold water. When I lost feeling again I took a hot shower and the water became too hot and I ended up with a few first and second degree burns across my neck and shoulders. So, I switched to cold and solved the problem. Which, I have actually saved a few dollars on my electric bill a month due to the switch.

I have to be careful when cleaning my hair or face, to not get soap in my eyes. I've apparently suffered from corneal irritation more times than the average person. Now, even if I suspect that I got soap in my eyes I have to rinse them for fifteen minutes. Other normal morning activities follow, such as brushing my teeth. I don't have a single cavity; my dentist is impressed with my dental hygiene. My dentist also doesn't know that I couldn't feel a tooth ache even if I wanted to, which is why I brush, floss and rinse twice a day.

One of the trickier tasks in the morning is shaving. As any person knows, a knick shaving bleeds like a gutted fish in hot water. With every pass of the razor over my jaw line I have to stop and make sure that nothing starts bleeding. One time I was running late for a wedding and I shaved quickly, too quickly. I was already dressed in my tux; did I mention I was one of the groomsmen? Regardless, I showed up at the chapel, with just about twenty minutes to spare. I scared the poor flower girl into hiding. That's the third girl that has run away from me screaming…

I had cut my jaw line and my neck, shirt and jacket was covered in blood. Luckily, the bride's mother was the sort that was overly anal about things had a spare white shirt that I could wear and well, most of the blood came out of the jacket. The ceremony was still lovely… once the flower girl came out of the closet. As I think of that time, it's one of the main reasons I prefer not to shave.

My morning routine is full of things I have to do to, such as eating. Eating is something that most people take for granted and one of the things that I didn't think would be something so drastically changed with the lack of sensations. Eating has become one of the most dreaded things of my day. I can't tell when I'm hungry, but I know that I am so I eat at the normal times of the day. Breakfast at seven, lunch at noon and dinner at five, I also snack in between meals, just to avoid a repeat of August 17, 2009. It was a ridiculously hot summer, one of the hottest summers on record I believe. It went something like this:

I woke up late, didn't eat breakfast. I ran to work, ended up working for a long time on different car accidents in direct sunlight. I was drinking plenty of water but I hadn't any to eat and with the lives of others in danger I was more focused on them. Now, if I was able to feel I would have been able to feel the muscles in my back were in spasm, my reflexes were non-existent and that if you pinched my skin it wouldn't snap back. I found out that I was suffering from dehydration, acute malnutrition and a mild heat stroke. I only found this out, after I was returning to my truck to head back to the office and passed out before I even got in my car.

That day I ended up with a few stitches in my head due to passing out and whacking my forehead against the step that one uses to get into tall vehicles and two different IV lines in either of my arms. I stayed two days in the hospital for that one.

There are other difficulties that come with eating, such as trying new foods. I can tell what they taste like but I don't know if and for how long something needs to be chewed. I'll generally watch someone else eat something and time how long they chew it before swallowing and I'll do the same. I can say that there is a bright side to not being able to feel the texture of the food I'm eating. Such as, I love the taste of bananas but always hated the texture of the fruit. So, now that I can't feel the texture, I can eat as many as I want.

When I get dressed, I have to put the holster for my gun in the same place every day. It is the only way I know that if I need my gun in a hurry, that when I reach for it, I'll actually be able to grab it accurately. I learned having to do this trick the hard way and that is something I don't really feel like talking about.

There are other things that become more increasingly complicated when you lose all tactile sensations, such as exercise. I have to exercise due to the fact that I'm constantly snacking to make sure I don't starve. However, my exercise routine is highly regulated and very specific. It is no more than sixty minutes a day, with thirty minutes used for cardio and another twenty for strength training and then ten minutes for a cool down. I didn't usually do the cool down, the stretching after excising, because I could never feel the sore muscles but my doctor ever so informed me that constantly stressing your muscles without a period to let them relax before returning to normal activity was worse than not exercising. So far I haven't had any incidents with over exercising, well, at least none that I am aware of.

Other things that were once automatic that have become a hassle include things like using the restroom. I've got it down to a science, I go when I wake up the morning and then thirty-five minutes after any time I have a meal or consume a large amount of liquid and then before bed. Although, it does become a little awkward to explain why my watch beeps at exactly 12:35 every day to people I don't know. If people do ask, I tell them it's for medication.

Speaking of medication; becoming ill has got to be one of the stranger occurrences when you can't feel. I'll just share a story to put it into perspective. This happened a while ago. My father had been sick with the flu the week prior and a few days after he returned to work he commented that I was looking under the weather. When I found out that Garland had the flu I went and got a flu shot, I don't normally get the yearly vaccine but I figured since I was working side-by-side with someone who had it that I should get vaccinated.

I told my father this and he concluded that I was probably just having a small reaction to the vaccine as what usually happens to people. This was not the case, it was not a small reaction and I had full blown flu. In fact, the doctor said that I probably had the flu before I got vaccinated, which just put my immune system into over drive and that became very obvious when an officer and I were interviewing a witness and I vomited all over them. I didn't feel it coming and I also didn't feel it coming when I threw up in the passenger seat of my Bronco or any of the times I spent hunched over my toilet just in case I threw up again.

It was single handily one of the most embarrassing and hilarious situations I had ever found myself in. The only reason it was amusing was due to the fact that the person I threw up on was Duke. I don't think he has forgiven me for ruining his favorite pair of shoes yet. By some grace above I haven't thrown up since that bout of illness and I really hope I don't puke ever again.

It is usually the small things that affect me the most, I've gotten used to having to eat on a schedule or using the bathroom regularly, but it still bothers me that I can't feel the clothes that I wear, or the sun on my face when I go outside. That there is no sensation when I am in a body of water or near a warm fire during the winter. I use to impulsively play with my hair, which is why I kept it slightly longer, but now I cut it short. It's just not the same when I can't tell if there is actually hair between my fingers.

People that don't know about the troubles or don't want to believe in them know me to have Idiopathic Neuropathy. It is what the doctors diagnosed me with all those years ago and it is still in my textbook thick medical file. I did some researching about Idiopathic Neuropathy, or for the sake of conversation, IP. Everything that came up in the search just proved more and more that my affliction is not a medical condition. It is called idiopathic because the cause is unknown, I know what causes this. Neuropathy simply refers to the fact that it deals with the nervous system. The textbook definition of IP says that someone with this disorder loses slight sensations of pain and that is it.

People that actually have IP can still feel warmth, cold, the texture of fabric, pleasure… From what I have found in my searches, the only people that can't feel anything like me are dead, a thought that I have pondered for a long time. Am I actually alive? What makes a person living? To reassure myself I press my hands to my ears tightly so I can hear the blood rush through my ears and take a deep breath to hear the air rush into my lungs. In the morning I lean over the sink and breathe on the mirror until it fogs. That is one of the reasons I like winter, whenever I go outside I have a visual reminder that I am still breathing.

Whether it is people that know my affliction is caused by the troubles or it is due to Idiopathic Neuropathy, the same question always follows. What does it feel like not to feel? That's a rather sadistic question if I do say so myself. It literally feels like nothing. How can I explain to a person what is like to not be able to feel the clothes on my skin, the glass I put to my lips to drink from, the soft fur of a dog underhand? I can't put into words what is like to be walking and bump into something and just suddenly be facing a new direction.

People ask if it is like when your feet go numb from sitting on them or the way your mouth feels after being injected with Novocain, I just tell them that they are probably right. But I'm sure those descriptions don't even come close. In reality, I _feel_ like a living mannequin, I _feel _like a fake person. I don't _feel _real.

That is, until I realized that I could _feel _Audrey…


End file.
